Vice President Dick Cheney gave a commencement address to cadets at West Point last weekend and said something stone amazing. And in doing so he articulated a sentiment that I think is widespread on the right, one which we might hope is not widespread among the people in his audience.
“As Army officers on duty in the war on terror,” said Cheney, “you will now face enemies who oppose and despise everything you know to be right, every notion of upright conduct and character, and every belief you consider worth fighting for and living for. Capture one of these killers, and he’ll be quick to demand the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States. Yet when they wage attacks or take captives, their delicate sensibilities seem to fall away.”
The terrorists, continued Cheney, are “men who glorify murder and suicide.” They stoop to the depths of barbarism.
And the suggestion seemed to be that we must fight them on their own terms. Eye for an eye - barbarity for barbarity.
For the protections of the Geneva Convention — of the Constitution of the United States itself — are for those with “delicate sensibilities.” This war being existential, our opponents being driven solely by the “ideologies of hatred and violence,” we cut them any slack at our own risk; should we hew to that which we have long claimed proves the superiority of our own system, our own civilization, we may lose. So waterboarding, the evisceration of habeus corpus become strategic necessities - perhaps even moral ones.
I don’t know how else to read Cheney’s speech. And this is indeed a staple of right-wing thought: To the extent we are not winning in Iraq, it’s because we haven’t been brutal enough. They are pitiless so we must be as well; our limp-wristed “delicate sensibilities” must be tossed overboard. Only then can civilization prevail.
The problem is that Cheney’s audience - cadets, future officers - are expressly required to pledge that they will “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” and that they will “bear true faith and allegiance to the same.”
But how can they defend what the Vice President has so cagily suggested is the greatest source of our weakness?
